Place and the specifics of place are supremely significant in Tim Winton’s writing. It has established the South-west corner of Western Australia as its region, and the elements of that area, sea, sky, and forest, recur in his stories, images of an ultimate if unknowable meaning in the world. The people of Winton’s fiction live outside cities, immersed in their natural environment, from which the best of them learn as they struggle to make sense of their lives. Physical and metaphysical frontiers give Winton’s work its special flavour. Placed as they are, closer to nature than culture, his characters and the events of their stories develop beyond the boundaries of what we ordinarily know of ourselves and how we understand the world around us.

In The Winter Dark acknowledges that this knowing must include an apprehension of those things that lie beyond consciousness. Its epigraph comes from Victor Hugo: ‘There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness,’ and the dark dimension of human life with its inexplicable terrors presses upon the characters of this story. Set in a lonely valley, called locally ‘the Sink’, in the forests of the far south of Winton’s region, this narrative is told to Darkness by an old man, Maurice Stubbs. His telling of a series of weird happenings in the valley a year ago is an attempt to comprehend them, to ‘see the joins, the cells of it’, and to absolve his part in them, to relieve their pressure, to understand their history.